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For twenty years, they had been closer than sisters, sharing girlhood secrets, their hopes and dreams for the future—and a soul-searing promise. Melissa was the only one who knew what had really happened to Jannie beyond the sacred walls of the Mormon Temple the night that changed her life forever….

UNTIL HER BEST FRIEND VANISHED WITHOUT A TRACE.Now Melissa has gone missing, just days after entrusting Jannie with a mysterious box that someone would kill to possess. And someone has—leaving in their murderous wake an innocent victim and a trail of blood that leads to the heart of Jannie's hidden burden. Desperate to protect her secret, and to find out what has happened to Melissa, Jannie trusts no one. Not the stranger whose piercing green eyes have already seen too much, nor the family and friends whose familiar fold may be shielding a cold-blooded killer who is lurking BEHIND CLOSED DOORS.

Behind Closed Doors - Natalie R. Collins

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Prologue

I am Sarah.

At least, that is the new—and secret—name I was given by the temple worker during my endowments several months ago, shortly before I bailed on my wedding. I would not answer to this name if you hailed me with it on the street. In fact, I would probably not even realize you were talking to me.

I need this name so my husband can use it to recognize and acknowledge me and pull me through the veil—which separates this life from the Celestial Kingdom—into heaven. Since I have no husband, and the only man who knows it is complete anathema to me, it seems a moot point. I don’t consider myself Sarah. I am—as I have always been—Janica Emily Fox.

My best friend, Melissa, has been wild-eyed and slightly freaked out for the past few minutes, ever since the elderly female temple worker reached under the white vestment and blessed her various parts, washing and anointing her and providing her with the garment of the Holy Priesthood. After that, she put on all the temple garb—worn over her beautiful dress—before she was paraded through the various rooms and movies that make up the endowment ceremony. That’s around the time she got her new secret name, too, and I wonder how that makes her feel. Was it as strange and unsettling to her as it had been to me?

I’m sure that the new name, along with trying to learn the secret handshakes and passwords that guarantee one’s entry into heaven, have really thrown her off on this day that is supposed to be the most special in a young Mormon girl’s life. They don’t call them handshakes, of course, or even handclasps, which is more representative of what they encompass. They are called tokens, and along with the signs, they come with an ominous overtone—penalties for revealing the sacred description of the rite. You don’t tell people what goes on in the temple. Not without horrible consequences. The powers that be are vague about what those are, but they include the wrath of God, a threat that has left me terrified all of my life.

Knowing Melissa the way I do, having been her best friend for the past twenty years, I knew she wouldn’t much like that part of the temple ceremony. The endowment was one of the most bizarre rituals I have ever endured, and my former fiancé swears it led me to bolt before our actual wedding ceremony took place.

He is only partly right. But today is not about me, or Brian Williams, who watches me now from the other side of the room, glowering slightly, as if to say, This should be us. We should be kneeling before the altar.

This is Melissa’s wedding day. The pallor from her slight state of shock has worn off, and she is radiant, beaming with her happiness, almost as though she has completely forgotten what came before. Only I know that’s not true. Her arms by her sides, her fingers play a piano scale up and down her legs, always the telltale sign she is nervous. She doesn’t show much outwardly. She never has. Melissa has confidence by the gallon jug, and doesn’t allow many people to see through to the vulnerable person who exists inside all young women, brought on by the terrors and uncertainty of adolescence and the expectations of adulthood. But I know it’s there, because I know her. No one knows her like I do.

And no one really knows what to expect on their wedding day inside the temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These things are sacred, and only the most worthy enter here. You don’t get much preparation. She begged me to tell her, but I wouldn’t—I couldn’t. Now, the worst part is over, and she is waiting for her husband to pull her through the veil that symbolizes the entrance to the Celestial Kingdom, so they can be sealed for time and all eternity.

She looks lovely. Even though I cannot see her modest white gown, which I helped her pick out, I know it features intricate beading, a tight bodice, and cap sleeves that will cover her garments—the Mormon underwear she will wear from this day forward. The reason I can’t see her wedding finery is because she is wearing the Mormon temple garb over them—a green fig leaf apron over a bulky robe, one that fits over one shoulder and then is tied with a sash that must fit over the top part of the green apron, with the bow of the sash on the right hip. It’s all part of the ritual.

All the dramas, including the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, have been acted out, played before us on a movie screen. All that is left is the sealing, and it is simple, and sweet, and nothing like the dramatic and terrifying endowments. At least, I found them terrifying; my mother always claims to have found them soothing. I spent the majority of the time worrying about how I was going to remember all those signs so my Father in Heaven would know to let me into His kingdom, and suffering an extreme form of claustrophobia that reached boiling point right as Brian called my new name to guide me through the veil.

I could not answer to the name Sarah.

Melissa’s parents watch, smiling and nodding, happy and complete in their daughter’s achievement—an eternal temple marriage. Michael’s parents, standing next to them, beam. My parents also watch Melissa, although my mother’s face is easy to read. Why Pete and Angela’s daughter? Why not hers? Why did her daughter turn tail and run, thrash her way out of the temple, and require paramedics to be called to calm her hysteria? The little old lady serving as a temple matron I had knocked down in my desperation to find an exit had also required medical attention. Three days later, I called my wedding off. Melissa begged me to tell her what had me so freaked out, but I couldn’t. I had taken an oath.

So she bravely withstood her own endowment nightmare (she’d whispered to me afterward, That was very weird), but the slightly wild look in her eyes when we first entered this sealing room is gone; she now seems quite calm and serene.

The room itself is unremarkable, unlike other parts of the temple, which are elegantly and elaborately decorated. The walls are mirrored, and in the middle is an altar where Melissa kneels on one side and Michael on the other. They take each other’s right hand in the Patriarchal Grip, the Second Token of the Melchizedek Priesthood, also known as the Sure Sign of the Nail, thumbs and little fingers interlocked, and index fingers placed on the wrist just above the hand. Melissa fumbles around with it a bit, and blushes, as all around them stand the signs of achievement in Mormondom—worthy, temple-recommend-holding adults watching in benign love and grace as yet another young couple commits their lives to God and the church. It is quiet and peaceful. There is no music. No flowers. No young children dressed in their Sunday fineries, playing tag around the feet of the adults. No celebration. It’s…a little bland.

Michael looks proud, slightly arrogant (as he always has), but also a little humble (which he rarely is). His vanity and calm take-charge manner has always attracted Melissa. Her mother is a little flighty and given to nervous spells where she takes to bed, when she isn’t ordering her family around; and her father is quiet, and meek, and unable to hold down a job for longer than a year at a time. I am sure Michael will always be strong and the leader of his family, because that is what she has always wanted—a priesthood holder, a man to lead and support his family. I know Michael will always do that. He is—well, a take-charge kind of guy.

My Brian—my ex-Brian, I should say—has always tried to be the same way, but he pales in comparison to Michael. He is a second-in-command type, always waiting for Michael to lead the way. All through school, there was Michael and, following behind, albeit closely, there was Brian. They looked enough alike they could be brothers, both tall with dark brown hair, broad shoulders, and strong, handsome, sturdy features. But whatever Brian did, Michael usually did it better. Brian got used to letting someone else lead, and so he looked to me to make all the decisions in our relationship, our upcoming nuptials, our marriage.

Poor Brian was always slightly outside, all throughout our childhood and growing up, because his parents were outsiders. They were Gentile—non-Mormons—who had allowed their only child to be baptized Mormon so he would fit into our predominantly Mormon community. Because he didn’t have the parental backing we did, the family heraldry of Mormonism, he never pushed ahead to lead our group. There were only a few times when he had taken the lead, when he had pushed to be my patriarch, my priesthood holder, and the results had been disastrous. So he backed off and let me lead—and I did. I made the decision that I would never again set foot inside this temple and endure something as creepy as the endowment ceremony.

Luckily for me, I had only bolted my marriage and sealing and had already endured the endowment, so I was able to see Melissa be married—I still had a valid temple recommend. Others were not so lucky, like our school friends who weren’t yet married or hadn’t gone on missions, or her younger brothers and sisters. It had taken all the strength I had—and some Xanax we stole from Melissa’s mother—to get me back through these doors.

When the brief ceremony is over, everyone congratulates the couple as they stand together and smile. It is quiet and we all hug them quickly then shuffle out and down to the dressing rooms to change into our street clothes—or in my case, my sea-foam green bridesmaid’s dress and dyed-to-match shoes—so we can stand in front of the temple and on the grounds and have our pictures taken. There are no photos allowed inside the sacred temples of my birth religion.

Melissa holds Michael’s hand tightly for one more minute, and then they separate, but not before sharing bright smiles. She follows me to the ladies’ dressing room, although, as the bride, she has her own special room where only she and her mother can go. In that room, she will remove her temple garb and put on the beautiful veil that came with her gown in place of the simple veil worn for the ceremony.

Well, Mrs. Melissa Holt, how do you feel? I ask her.

I’m so happy. I’ve been waiting for this all my life.

Chapter One

Five years later

I got the call that changed my life forever around two P.M. on Tuesday, June 28.

The coffee I had poured thirty minutes before had gone cold as I stared into my computer screen and talked on the phone, arranging for a restraining order against the husband of one of my repeat clients. Debbie Talon floated in and out of our shelter every several months, convinced her husband, Brandon, was going to kill her. I was convinced, too, but it made no difference. Debbie always returned to him, and they always paid a reunion visit to their bishop, who praised their decision to keep the family unit together. In another couple of months Debbie knocked on our door again, dragging with her a four-year-old son, eight-year-old daughter, and, once, a fetus that didn’t live through the night, having been punched and kicked to death while still inside his mother’s body.

The Salt Lake City Police Department had finally gotten involved after the last one, even though Debbie begged everyone, including me, not to tell them. She loved Brandon. He was her eternal companion.

Somehow, her eternal companion convinced them she was clumsy and fell down the stairs. No charges were filed, but they were watching him. Without Debbie’s testimony, they could do little because there was no proof that anything except a terrible fall had happened. She backed up the clumsy story. They knew what I knew, even though they couldn’t—and some wouldn’t—move against a fellow priesthood holder without black-and-white proof. Apparently, black-and-blue was not enough.

Yesterday, she had shown up with a new complaint—a multicolored patch on her daughter’s back. This time, she swore she wouldn’t return, wouldn’t put up with this, wouldn’t even call her bishop. I knew better, but maybe Brandon didn’t. So for now, I would try to get her the restraining order, even while knowing it was probably pointless.

I arranged the order and wrote down instructions for Debbie—which she would undoubtedly ignore. After I was done, I picked up the mug and took a sip of tepid coffee and almost spit it back out. Blah. Coffee was evil. I knew that. If anyone from my past life—the one I led before I first attended a session in the Mormon LDS Temple—could have seen me, they would have been shocked.

I was not honest with those who knew me from before. It pained me, but it was necessary. I could not handle their pressure. It was just easier to pretend I still believed, that I attended church on a regular basis, that I never drank coffee or alcohol, or even thought about sex. Of course, the last was not true at all. I thought about it all the time. I just wasn’t doing it.

I stood up to refresh my coffee, the phone rang, and I sighed. Some other disaster, some other abuser, some other horrible omen or event to attend to—maybe even Sunday dinner at my parents’ house, where I would be grilled endlessly about the singles ward I told them I attended, and about any possible prospects for marriage, and—worst of all—whether or not I had considered going on a mission. Since I wasn’t married, and showed no signs of ever being so, that was expected of me. It was the fate of all old maids. Next month I would be twenty-six years old.

Oh, Jannie, came my mother’s voice over the line.

I’d been right. Somebody give me a quarter and call me Madame Zelda.

But I didn’t correctly predict what she would say next.

Jannie, something terrible has happened. Lissa is missing. She’s been gone half the day. She never showed up for work, and Jannie? Jannie, are you listening?

My mother needed constant reinforcement that everyone within miles was attuned to the sound of her voice. The scary part was they usually were.

I’m listening, Mom. I’m just in shock.

Melissa, my longtime friend, had been missing for six hours and everyone was getting frantic. Steady, dependable Melissa, who always reined her emotions in, would not just up and disappear. She would never just not show up for work, or fail to call in, so we all knew that something was wrong.

Please come, my mother said, her words compact and tight, her unusual brevity a sign that things were horribly out of kilter.

I left my desk at the YWCA Women’s Shelter, hurried down the long hallway to my boss’s office, and popped my head in the door, quickly explaining that I needed to leave, to join the search party combing the canyons behind Michael and Melissa’s apartment. Millicent Stone, a fifty-year-old former Catholic nun who had saved more women from monsters than any knight in shining armor could ever claim to have done, understood completely. Millie was small of frame and stature, with short, close-cropped gray hair, a heavily lined face, and eyes that expressed more than she could ever say in words. There was usually a touch of sorrow in those eyes. In our line of work, disaster is always little more than a phone call away. We’ve learned to adapt.

As I drove my Honda Civic toward the Canyon View Stake Center, where the command post for Melissa’s search had been set up, fear raced through my mind. Surely Melissa had just lost track of time, or thought she had arranged for sick leave because she had a prior engagement.

But what if that wasn’t the case? What if she had been kidnapped, taken by an unknown assailant for nefarious purposes? Although I knew the odds of that were slim, the case of Elizabeth Smart still loomed in my mind. The obvious suspects are those closest to the victim. Stranger abduction is rare. Look first at the family. These were my mantras, as a domestic abuse counselor.

But Michael and Melissa had a strong relationship. She laughed sometimes, and I frowned and fought to keep from speaking my mind, because he always wanted to know where she was, who she was with, what she was doing. He bought her a cell phone and then had to up the minutes because he called her so often they were hit with huge overage charges. Sometimes, when we were together, she’d sigh when the phone rang. No one else called her. It was always Michael.

But she loved him. And he adored her. I remembered him serenading her, back when we were in high school, singing silly, sappy romantic tunes and then sulking when she laughed at him, even though she did it kindly.

They had problems, but who didn’t? I couldn’t even stay in a relationship for twenty minutes. Michael would never lay a hand on her. So who would hurt Melissa? Was she dead? No, no, don’t think that way. No! She’s fine. She just got busy and forgot to go to work, and to call in and tell them, and to…

Everyone loved her. She was the type of person who really listened, who met new people and immediately knew everything about them, all their secrets spilling out. They walked away, saying, What a nice person, without even realizing they knew absolutely nothing about her.

Melissa even knew my secret, one I had shared with no one else.

My cell phone rang, and I answered with a quick and breathless hello, praying it was someone calling to tell me that Melissa was fine.

Jannie, it’s Brian. Melissa is missing. Have you seen her?

His voice sent a cold chill down my spine, and I felt the fear, the anger, and the claustrophobia return. God help me, I really hated him. It wasn’t healthy. I kept my voice calm and modulated.

No, Brian, but my mom called me. I’m on my way.

Good. Michael needs support. Lissa’s car has been found in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven close to their house. It doesn’t look good.

I felt as though someone had punched me in the stomach. I didn’t want to hear this.

Why would she have gone there? I asked, after a moment’s silence.

She went to buy milk. Mike says they were out of it, and she told him she was going to go get some, even woke him up, since he was sleeping. She left, he went back to sleep, and when he woke up again it was ten A.M. He just figured she had let him sleep and gone to work. And you can find out more when you come here. You’re great at supporting your friends. You’ve always been good at supporting everyone but me. He disconnected. I guess he hated me, too. I’d broken his heart. His lack of spirit and chivalry had broken mine. If only my relationship had been more like the one Mike and Melissa shared.

Melissa…

Flashes of the last time I saw her played through my mind. It had been an odd encounter. She’d shown up at my doorstep around seven-thirty one evening the week before. We hadn’t seen each other in months and had only talked on the phone once or twice. So, to open the door and see her standing there was a bit of a